George's Weblog

I spent some time today trying out Evernote. It seems to do some things well but I'm still forming my overall opinion. One of the things I wanted to do was to be able to send emails from my Entourage client into Evernote. A quick Google search revealed a script from Veritrope that does just that.

It took me a while to get it going though. I use Entourage 2008 on Mac Snow Leopard. I followed the instructions which were fairly straightforward but I was not able to get the script to execute, nor did it show up on the Entourage script menu. Here are the things that I found that may be helpful for someone else who is trying the same thing.

First of all, you do want to put the script in the /Users/yourusername/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items folder. You can also rename it the way it's outlined in the instructions so that a shortcut key can be assigned. You should keep the filename extension however because the system won't recognize it as an Applescript without it. Here is how my filename looked from a shell:

-rw-rw----@ 1 george  staff  30252 May 17 02:33 Entourage to Evernote\msE.scpt

I did chmod it a little to make it match the rest of the files in that directory although I don't think it's necessary. Now you will notice that the script does not appear in the Entourage menu. That's because you need to compile it. So fire up the Applescript editor (found in Applications/Utilities) and do a File Open and navigate to the file. Then hit the compile button and then do a Save As. I chose the Script Bundle option. It then created a directory and put the required resources including the compiled script inside:

drwxr-xr-x@  3 george  staff    102 May 17 02:45 Entourage to Evernote\msE.scptd

Afterward, everything works from the Entourage script menu and also by using the keyboard shortcut, in this case Command-Shift-E.

It would be really nice if this script could also send attachments but alas it only does text (and not even pictures). So I guess I still have to do things a roundabout way to get the entire message in there such as forward it. Except for the attachments I suppose I could print it to a PDF. Evernote sets up a PDF-to-Evernote option for printed output.